Last week was extraordinarily exciting and exhausting. On Monday I bought a flat (!!!) and led a tour of Leicester’s more weird and wonderful sites for the delegates of Museum Utopias. The weather was absolutely gorgeous (hard to believe now, as I sitting here watching the rain, sleet and snow outside my window). There are some pics from the afternoon here.

Museum Utopias (blog) kicked off for real on Tuesday, and continued into Wednesday. I was involved with organising and delivering the Future Museum Game (trademark). It would be way too complicated to explain here, but we were delighted that the delegates really engaged with the task at hand and entered into the (slightly surreal) spirit of the exercise with gusto.

On Friday…well, on Friday I got a new job! (More about that later.) But it was also notable for the private view and launch of ‘Suits and Saris‘, the exhibition I had been working on for the last eighteen months, or so, with a curatorial team comprised of youth and community members, alongside museum professionals. A very emotional and rather overwhelming experience, it was a delight to see so many happy faces at the launch. It really seems to have captured people’s imagination, and I’m absolutely delighted with how it has turned out. The project involved many, many hours of hard work but, seeing the result, it was most definitely worth it! The exhibition is open until 7th October 2012, at New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester. Free entry.

1970s ‘Japanese’ saris on display at Suits and Saris
(The purple and red examples were found by me in Oxfam!)

‘Body Conscious’ at Suits and Saris (my baby)

The excitement didn’t end there. On Saturday I visited ‘Unravelled‘ at Nottingham – an exhibition curated by Nottingham Castle Museum’s Illuminate youth panel. They have produced a fantastic exhibition (IMO streets ahead of the ‘big’ loan exhibition, ‘Living in Silk’, that it accompanies) and I’m immensely proud of the interpretation group, who I worked with in January and February on developing interpretive text for the exhibition. They are brilliant!

As part of the project, the Illuminate team made a short stop-motion film (alongside a ‘how we made it’ doc) inspired by objects in the Castle Museum’s permanent collection. Do watch; it’s lovely.

The exhibition is open until 16th September, at Nottingham Castle Museum. Entrance fee applies.

Both ‘Suits and Saris’ and ‘Unravelled’ are part of ‘Dress the World‘, the East Midlands’ contribution to ‘Stories of the World’, the museum strand of the Cultural Olympiad 2012.